As I have suggested here before, there are few joys in life equal to that of watching the left fall out among itself. Whatever your political views, the whole Judean People’s Front vibe of the parties to the left of the Labour party brings a special type of comedy. If anybody remembers the recent Your Party conference they will know what I am talking about. In fact if anybody still remembers Your Party, they deserve a box of chocolates.
But something similar now seems to be happening on the political right. And the Gorton and Denton by-election has brought it into a clearer light.
If you are going to have a party to the right of the Conservatives, don’t echo their past rhetoric
As well as the Reform candidate, Matt Goodwin, being on the ballot, there is also Nick Buckley of Advance UK. This is a party set up by Ben Habib after he fell out with the Reform party leader Nigel Farage. Then this past weekend another person who fell out with Nigel Farage – Rupert Lowe MP – formally launched his Restore Britain party. Lowe has promised to make Restore a national party. And now the parties to the political right seem to be entering a similar spiral to those on the political left.
It is possible to see all of this as nothing more than the result of personal fall-outs – and what fall-outs they have been. You may remember that when Lowe and Farage fell out, Reform reported Lowe to the police and tried to have him arrested, which is the sort of thing that can cause a certain animus among former friends. This week Farage told a press conference: ‘I think, in terms of the way we dealt with that, we were probably more brutal than the other parties. But you know what? That’s the way it’s going to be.’
Beyond the personal, there are substantial disagreements here as well. Lowe managed to make some advances into Farage’s political territory after Farage gave an interview in 2024 in which he said that it was a ‘political impossibility’ to arrange the mass deportation of illegal migrants in the UK.
If you are going to have a party to the right of the Conservative party, there is not much point in echoing the Conservative party’s past rhetoric on this. After all, it was Boris Johnson who said before becoming prime minister that the British public should accept that mass immigration was something that had just happened and that all efforts should be put into integrating the people already here – only for him to become prime minister, increase the wave of migration several-fold and then make that integration exponentially more difficult.
To be fair to Farage, there are two caveats to his stance that are worth noting. The first is that in his 2024 interview he said that mass deportations of illegals was a political impossibility ‘at the moment’. Since that interview he has suggested that he is in fact open to the possibility of deporting people who have broken into the UK, although this has been met with the usual fatalistic claim that the country is in no position to deport anyone even if the general public did want it to happen.
It has to be noted that the issue of whether or not illegal migrants can be deported has opened up other schisms, some of which risk sending the political right into the kind of purity spiral that tends to be more common on the political left.
Following the divide over whether illegal migrants should be deported, there is another over whether or not people who are technically British but have no love for this country (who are involved with child-rape gangs, for instance) should be deportable. This in turn has opened up a schism over who counts as being British. And this is where a significant fork in the ideological road occurs.
Because on the one hand this issue risks descending into a racial purity game, something which it is hardly desirable to open up. On the other hand, it is frustrating to many people to continue to be told by parties of the political right that they have the same definition of Britishness as those concocted in the 2000s by the Blairite left.
This is the definition that anybody is British so long as they sign up to ‘British values’. A set of values which defines Britishness as – for instance – mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs.
The problem with such definitions is that they present Britain as little more than a sort of international airport terminal where, so long as you promise not to blow up the terminal, everyone can get along. And if you do try to blow up the terminal then you get to stay too.
Yet Britain was until quite recently something rather more specific and unique than that. We had a distinctive culture of our own. It was different from other cultures. You don’t need to think that it is better than all other cultures, but it was a culture which we loved because it was ours.
Reducing this culture to nothing, pretending it never existed, or was not created by a specific group of people or was in fact created by all cultures, is not a polite fiction. It is in fact a very impolite fiction. Not least because it is impolite to the people who did build this country.
There is never an easy way to heal personal differences between people who have personally fallen out, but there is a way to resolve these ideological differences that persist on the right.
The first would be to agree that things that have been done to the country which are harmful can be undone. The second would be to agree that culture and background are important but cannot become absolutely every-thing. Anyone who is interested can take these observations copyright free. Anyone who wants to continue the infighting can of course, equally freely, ignore them.
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